I'm afraid I find Jimbo's answer less than convincing; and he
correctly anticipates that I will charge him with circularity.
To begin with, what exactly does it mean to say:
"Fundamentally, living entities face a single alternative: existence
or non-existence."? Is this a disguised value judgment, to the effect
that "The most morally significant choice to make is whether to live
or to die"? (I trust that Jimbo will deny this interpretation, so I
move on.) Or is it a descriptive statement to the effect that
"You need to be alive to make any choices at all, so the choice to live
is a kind of causal root of every other choice"?
If the second, then it is clearly true, but so what? It only shows that
every value system is going to have to endorse life as a _means_; as
Ron Merrill explains in his _The Ideas of Ayn Rand_ this argument
shows that life is an ultimate _means_. But it hardly shows that life
is an end-in-itself, much less the only end-in-itself. Indeed, Rand's
council to suicide in dire situations (I can't place the quote -- could
it have been in a speech???) indicate that she (perhaps unwittingly)
counciled using life as a _means_ to _ending pain_; and hence the latter
goal would appear more fundamental.
Now Jimbo moves on to his most substantive argument: to ask "Why
_ought_ I choose to live?" is an example of the "stolen concept
fallacy." To fill in the non-Rand readers, this fallacy is the
fallacy of using a concept and treating it as valid while denying the
validity of the concepts upon which it depends. One example that I
believe Nathaniel Branden offered was the concept "orphan." It would
be incoherent for a person to affirm the existence of orphans but deny
that parents had ever existed. Another favorite example would be
claims like "We know that we know nothing," which claims knowledge
while denying it; or "I don't exist," which identifies yourself as
existing while denying it.
I have no problem with this idea in general. What I object to is its
_specific use_ in this situation. A person who says "You _ought_ to
kill yourself," is not "stealing any concepts. He is merely using the
word "ought" as it is used in standard English. For Jimbo to be right,
it would have to be the case that somehow, everyone using the word
"ought" is covertly saying that it is necessary for survival. And this
is empirically simply false; to say that "You ought to do X" means
nothing more or less than that you ought to do it. If you doubt this,
just try this thought experiment: imagine a Nazi says "You ought to
kill as many Jews as possible." Can you honestly say that you don't
know what he _MEANS_? No -- his meaning is clear, which is why you
are able to disagree with it.
Perhaps Jimbo will say that ordinary English is philosophically unsound;
and that the vast majority of ought-statements are arbitrary claims
about nothing. The only meaningful ought-statements are ones which
indicate a causal relationship between an action (state of affairs,
etc.) and the promotion of an agent's life. It is of course possible to
maintain this; but it is highly implausible. I say "You ought not to
murder people." Is my meaning unclear? Do you have in mind a
distinct proposition? Does the distinctness of that proposition depend
at all upon whether you believe Jimbo's argument that murder is never
in your self-interest? Upon reflection, I think you will see that Jimbo
is attempting to define alternative moral views into non-existence by
denying that they mean anything, when their meaning is quite clear.
And at the same time, he is attempting to define his own moral views
as true by the simple trick of saying, "Well, X is good because "good" just
means X."
My alternative view is that good means good, and that's all there is to
say. The concept good is simple, like "yellow." Moral philosophers'
task is not to define this simple concept, but instead to indicate what
classes of things possess it. Asking someone to define "yellow" is
pointless; but it is quite sensible to ask them what objects are
yellow. The worst route would be to say "Well, "yellow" just means
square things," and then say that all of the people who doubt your view
are stealing the concept of yellow.
--Bryan